Meal prepping has been taking over recently. From Pinterest to Instagram to YouTube, it’s pretty hard to avoid. And it’s for a good reason. When done right, meal prepping can be a life saver. It is a great way to maintain your clean-eating without falling of the healthy bandwagon and will save you a lot of time in the long run. Here are 12 tips for meal prepping that will make it SO much easier and ensure that your meal planning stays on track.
If you want to be a pro at meal prepping, the first thing that you need to do is plan how your week is going to look. Decide which days you will need a lunch to take to work, which evenings you will be eating out with friends and when you will be eating dinner at home. List the days of the week, and next to each day list the meals that you will need to prep for that day (eg. breakfast, lunch or dinner).
This is the fun part. Go through all the recipe books that you have, decide which ones tickle your fancy and make a list of all the ingredients you need to buy for the week. However, bear in mind that you will actually be making these meals, so don’t get carried away but try to keep it as simple and easy as possible (but still tasty, see tip 12). You’ll thank yourself for it when the time comes to cook, that’s for sure. This is one of the really fun tips for meal prepping!
We’ve all heard the age old tale: we have a shopping list, we go to Tesco, we see Jacob’s Mini Cheddars are on offer for buy one get one free and the shopping list goes out the window. It’s so important to make your shopping list and stick to it. Resist the temptation (and the 12 pack of Kit Kat Chunkys staring you in the eye). Avoiding unwanted junk food in your shopping cart will help you stick to your plan and save you a few extra pennies, which of course, no one is complaining about.
Who actually makes plans for Sundays? In reality, you wake up, make yourself some toast and sit on the sofa in your dressing gown with your eye glued to the TV until it’s time to go back to bed. Make use of your Sunday and keep a few hours free in the afternoon to do your weekly shop and prepare your meals for the week. This way you’ll be making the most of an otherwise wasted day AND saving yourself time during the week. Stick Netfix on while you chop and you’ll soon be wondering why you hadn’t started doing this sooner.
We all know that fresh veggies are so much more appealing and, some may argue, healthier for you that frozen veggies, but the problem with fresh food is that the ‘use-by’ date of often a lot sooner than we realise. This means that you’ll be buying fresh vegetables and before you know it, they’ll be out of date. Save yourself some money and reduce your food waste by buying frozen vegetables in bulk instead which you can stick in the freezer and cook when and as you please. This is one of the really helpful tips for meal prepping!
If you find cooking a dull and laborious task and the prospect of preparing a week’s worth of food in a day frankly horrendous, then a great tip for food prepping is to invest in a kitchen gadget which will make you look forward to cutting up your veggies every Sunday. For example, the Brieftons QuickPush Food Chopper makes chopping vegetables an absolute breeze (and is also extremely satisfying to use) and will save you a huge amount of time.
One tip that I always find very useful for food prepping and cooking in general is having a good variety of healthy condiments stocked away in my cupboard. This means that you can immediately change the flavour of any meal you’ve prepared and spice it up a bit if you feel it’s a bit bland. For example, soy sauce, lemon juice and tahini are great flavours which can quickly and effortlessly transform almost any meal. This is one of the most important tips for meal prepping!
A key tip for food prepping is to make sure that you have enough containers to store your beautifully prepped meals in. You definitely do not want to run into a situation where you have made all the effort to prepare your meals and now have no way to store them. You can buy plastic containers in bulk from stores such as IKEA or Poundland, or alternatively if you want the eco-friendly option, you can opt for glass containers which you can buy in almost any department store.
Your freezer is an extremely underrated tool in the meal prepping process. If you realise that you have made too much food for the week, or Tuesday arrives and you have told Tanya from work that you’ll grab a GBK with her when you have those chicken skewers waiting for you at home, you can just stick the meal in the freezer and have it next week instead. Easy Peasy. Just remember to stick a label on the container, which smoothly leads me to my next tip…
I cannot stress the importance of labelling enough. Once you have packaged all your meals into their containers, stick a label on the lid and write the date that you prepared the meal, what the meal is and the day of the week that each meal corresponds to. If you want to stick the container in the freezer, remember that frozen food can last up to roughly 3 months in the freezer, so in this case it is also best to write the expiration date on the label. This is one of the vital tips for meal prepping!
If you have a big enough oven, roasting can make meal-prepping an absolute dream. This is because most vegetables can be roasted in batch, meaning that you can stick your parsnips, sweet potato, garlic, tomatoes, courgettes, aubergine and a few chicken breasts all in the oven for 45 minutes at the same temperature and create multiple different meals effortlessly. Roasting is also one of the healthiest ways to cook, so that’s another reason to make full use of that fancy roasting tray your mum got you two Christmasses ago.
Not Literally. I mean, unless you like spice. I mean that a key tip to meal prepping is to keep things interesting. It can be tempting to prepare multiple containers of the same meal and eat the same thing every day, but I can guarantee that you will get bored quickly. This can be as simple as squirting some lemon juice over your salmon or sprinkling some chili flakes over your avocado. Or alternatively, mix up your meals by interchanging a side salad with roasted vegetables or a side of quinoa so that your meals are not repetitive and boring. So, there you go, 12 key tips for meal prepping that will make it so much easier.
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